In this episode of Sera na Sauti, Koko Sanginga, writer and editor, sits down with Nyasha Kadandara, the Zimbabwean filmmaker whose debut feature documentary Matabeleland spent seven years tracing the weight of unresolved grief in a family shaped by state violence. Nyasha is a filmmaker and cinematographer based in Nairobi. Matabeleland premiered at CPH:DOX Copenhagen in March 2025 and screened at the NBO Film Festival in Nairobi later that year. It is produced by LBx Africa, the Kenyan production house that has made a practice of backing African stories the rest of the world had not yet thought to look for.

The film follows Chris Nyathi, a 65-year-old Zimbabwean immigrant in Botswana who believes his family is cursed. His father was killed during the Gukurahundi massacres, when Robert Mugabe’s North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade was deployed into Matabeleland between 1983 and 1987. An estimated 20,000 people were killed. No senior official has been held accountable. Chris’s father remains in an unmarked grave. As the oldest son, this is a weight he has carried for decades, across borders, alongside the ordinary business of staying alive. His girlfriend Dumi wants marriage. Chris wants, first, to lay his father to rest.

Nyasha made a deliberate choice not to lead with the violence. She leads with Chris, with his hustle and his humour, with the specific texture of a man holding several obligations at once. The politics arrive as context, because that is how they arrive in his life. This choice is part of a larger argument Nyasha is making about documentary form. She wanted to show an African man being vulnerable in front of his partner, show Dumi as a full subject with her own demands and limits, show the mundane and the tender alongside the political. A generation of African filmmakers is pushing against the pressure to educate and testify first. Nyasha is one of them.

Seven years is a long time to carry someone else’s story. Nyasha reflects on what that commitment asks of a filmmaker, the patience it requires, the ethical weight of sitting with a family’s pain without resolving it prematurely, and the responsibility of representing a wound that an entire country has been asked to forget. The conversation also moves into the present: Zimbabwe has launched a community engagement programme around Gukurahundi, framed as healing and reconciliation. Survivor communities are sceptical, and the scepticism is earned. Reconciliation requires acknowledgement. Acknowledgement requires naming what happened and who ordered it. The form of accountability matters as much as its existence.

📌 Key themes from the conversation:

✅ The history of Gukurahundi, what the Fifth Brigade did in Matabeleland between 1983 and 1987, why the wound has not closed, and what accountability would actually require

✅ The deliberate storytelling choice to lead with character rather than chronology, and what that makes possible

✅ African masculinity on screen, what it means to show vulnerability and tenderness, and why that representation still registers as something new

✅ Dumi Ndaba as a full subject in her own right, and why Nyasha insisted her story not be collapsed into Chris’s

✅ The burden of instruction in African documentary, what a generation of filmmakers is choosing to put down, and what they are reaching for instead

✅ Zimbabwe’s community engagement programme on Gukurahundi, survivor scepticism, and why the form of acknowledgement matters as much as the fact of it

✅ Seven years of filming and the ethics of sitting with someone else’s grief without resolving it prematurely

📚 Reading and Watching Materials:

* Matabeleland via LBx Africa

* Nyasha Kadandara on Matabeleland and the Evolution of the African Documentary, Sinema Focus

* The Noisy Silence of Gukurahundi: Truth, Recognition and Belonging

* Nyasha Kadandara Unpacks the Historical and National Trauma in Matabeleland, Culture Custodian

* Will survivors of Zimbabwe’s Gukurahundi massacre finally get justice? Al Jazeera

* Nyasha Kadandara’s website

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